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CITY OF ELK GROVE

Police Department
Interoffice Correspondence
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Date: December 28, 2017

To: Tiffany Childress, Dispatch Manager

From: Jamie Hudson, Dispatch Supervisor

SUBJECT: Non-Service Initialized (NSI) Cellular 9-1-1 Calls from Apple

Sometime in the first two weeks of October, on-duty dispatch staff began seeing an
increase in NSI 9-1-1 calls hitting off of the tower at 2511 and/or 3011 Laguna
Boulevard. All of the calls have no voice contact with anyone on the other end of the
line, although voices can be heard periodically by the dispatcher. When a cellular
telephone has no active carrier subscription for dial tone, or service plan for internet, it
must still be able to call 9-1-1 by directive of a 1996 Federal Communications
Commission mandate which allows all NSI telephones the ability to reach 9-1-1.
On October 13th, a dispatcher proactively reached out to Apple security at the local
facility and told them about the issue we were having. At the time, the security official at
Apple believed the new Apple Watch was causing this to occur. Their belief at the time
was a particular button was being depressed for too long, which then causes the watch
to call 9-1-1.
I reached out to Apple security officer, Stefanie Anderson
(Stefanie.Anderson@apple.com) on October 20th, and began communication with her
regarding the issue we were still experiencing. She explained her theory of the Apple
Watch repair center depressing the buttons and said she would look into it. I asked
Stefanie if we were the only facility processing these watches in the United States. She
explained there was one other facility in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, but that it was a
contracted warehouse and not an official Apple warehouse.
I reached out to the Cumberland County Department of Public Safety in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania and explained the issue we were experiencing. I asked if they had
recently begun experiencing the same issue in their PSAP. They said they did have a
recent spike from a warehouse, but until I made contact with them, were unaware of its
affiliation with Apple and the Apple Watch.
I was contacted by Deb Burger (DBurger@apple.com) with Apple Gobal Security on
October 22nd. She asked for some information about our experiences and asked for
some statistics on the number of calls received. I have been communicating with Deb
ever since.
She thought the issue was narrowed down to packaging on the new iPhone 8 which
was recently launched, or the storage trays the new iPhones were placed on at the
facility. Since the new phones were a bit bigger, it was believes the phone pressed up

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against the side of the box when stacked, causing it to call 9-1-1. I was advised they
were in the process of manufacturing new storage trays and the problem should be
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resolved.
New packaging was delivered and began being used by Apple on or around December
11th. Unfortunately, this did not reduce the number of calls being received. I asked
ECaTS to run a report of NSI calls from the facility addresses for the 3-month period
prior to this issue beginning and compare it to the 3-month period since it began. The
results are below:

Address
Month 2511 3011
July 21 0
August 6 0
September 27 1
October 474 5
November 475 12
December 364 11
July - September 54 1
October -
December 1313 28
Grand Total 1367 29

As indicated in the data above, we received a total of 55 NSI calls between July and
September from the two locations. In contrast, we have received 1,341 since October.
The calls are typically only received Monday through Friday and generally cease around
Midnight each night.
I have not heard any update from Apple since their launch of the new trays in mid-
December. We are receiving approximately 20 calls per weekday, which is about 15-
20% of our overall 9-1-1 call volume on a typical weekday.